News Archive 2013

The Honorable Nirupama Rao, India's Ambassador to the United States, will open the Spring 2013 Brown-India Seminar on Monday, February 4 in Pembroke Hall 305. The seminar, chaired by Brown University President Christina Paxson, will be on "America's 'Asian Pivot': The View from India."

Peter Andreas writes that by the mid-19th century, America had become one of the leading industrial economies in the world -- thanks in large part to the very type of intellectual property theft it condemns in other nations today.

Keith Brown, currently a Fulbright scholar in the Republic of Macedonia, was featured last week on Zevzekmanija, a weekly television news magazine there. Brown spoke frankly about citizens' disappointment in the country's progress, and his own surprise to find that the issues which dominated the national conversation during his doctoral research there 20 years ago remain unresolved. Watch the segment — in Macedonian — on YouTube.

Ashutosh Varshney commented in the New York Times on the treatment of female rape victims by Indian police, who often deliver an abused woman into the hands of her abusers to avoid shaming family members. "A woman's body as the site of cultural purity is the predominant theme in the epics. And dishonoring a woman is equal to dishonoring a family and even a culture," Varshney said.

Keith Brown, currently a Fulbright Scholar in the Republic of Macedonia, writes in GlobalPost that despite a violent Christmas Eve altercation in parliament there, deep wells of civility and democracy endure. The peaceful protest and debate Brown has observed over the past weeks remind him of the call for non-violence issued by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," a treatise gaining attention — and recently translated — in an increasingly fraught Republic of Macedonia.

Vodka: vapid or versatile? Join Russian historian Pat Herlihy as she samples vodka drinks in some of Providence's finest watering holes. You'll learn about vodka's history and various uses, as well as the authentic way to enjoy this flavorless liquid. A professor of history emerita, Herlihy is the author, most recently, of Vodka: A Global History.

Watch Peter Andreas speak about the central irony described in his new book Smuggler Nation: the US, today the world's leading anti-smuggling policing superpower, owes its economic development, expansion, and very existence partly to smuggling. Andreas' fresh look at the role of illicit trade in American history has generated a lively discussion in the public sphere, with articles in Harper's, Slate, Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica, and bloomberg.com.

Mark Blyth, faculty fellow at the Institute and author of the forthcoming book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, explains that debate around revenue and spending should focus on growth, not deficit reduction. Speaking to a Bloomberg News reporter about the year-end fiscal cliff negotiations in Congress, Blyth suggests that "Democrats should have said to Republicans, 'You're the guys who created the debt. We'll deal with the debt when we return to growth. Get lost.'"

In a slate.com article, Peter Andreas recalls the unintended incubation of the US pornography and birth control industries by the 1873 anti-vice law that came to be known as the Comstock Act. Like most prohibitions, Andreas writes, the Comstock Act did not eliminate the sale and manufacture of so-called smut, but rather transformed it. The article draws from Andreas' forthcoming book Smuggler Nation.